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After Ukraine, what next for Russia and China?

By:   []

Date: 2022-05 

Two separate movements have taken place in the resurgent Russia since the early 2000s.

One is primarily economic.

Russia’s business elite has joined the ranks of the global rich, assuming the role of intermediary between the domestic resource sector and international financial markets. The number of Russian business people on the Forbes dollar billionaire list soared from just eight in 2001 to 87 in 2008, while real-estate markets in London and Dubai saw record purchases by the Russian nouveau riche with their bottomless pockets.

Importantly, Russia’s role in the global economy went beyond the resource periphery. Russian corporations assumed command and control functions in the post-Soviet space, expanding outward investment and capturing Soviet-era supply chains. Some went even further, buying steel mills in the US and cell phone operators in India.

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Russia’s new position was best described as sub-imperialist: a regional power that generally plays by the rules of Euro-Atlantic capitalism, yet is able to dictate its own terms of integration into the global economy. Another useful term for this strategy is “sovereign globalisation”.

The second movement was primarily political.

Speaking at the 2007 edition of the annual Munich Security Conference, Vladimir Putin for the first time presented a comprehensive list of grievances to the West, directly challenging the post-1989 world order. The Munich speech revealed Putin’s shallow, cynical vision of the world: a small number of ‘sovereign’ states carve out their ‘spheres of influence’, while others are relegated to the status of mere ‘territories’ subject to outside control.

The speech marked Putin’s characteristic style of foreign policy thinking. He has always been ready to expose ‘Western hypocrisy’ (indeed, not without reason), but he never offered any alternative foundation for the world order besides the principle of ‘might makes right’.

Talking to George W Bush, then US president, at the 2008 NATO summit, Putin apparently claimed that Ukraine was “not even a state”, and that Russia would dismantle it by annexing Crimea and the country’s eastern regions if Ukraine ever joined NATO. In the late 2000s, Russia launched a comprehensive modernisation of its army. The seeds of violence and chaos were planted.
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